Sorrell’s S4 Capital Bolts from Gate

Thu., Nov. 15, 2018

The performance marked the first trading update since Sorrell restructured the Derriston corporate shell and recast it as S4 with Holland’s MediaMonks as its core property.

“We already see both a widening and deepening of the company’s client base, resulting in a strong performance for all three pillars at MediaMonks,” said Sorrell in a statement, referring to MM’s creative content & innovation, assets at scale, and platforms and e-commerce units.

The WPP founder reported, “strong growth” in the US (New York and Los Angeles) and the addition of a San Francisco outpost to service technology clients.

S4 completed work for Mondelez, PVH/Tommy Hilfiger, Instagram, Coty and Compass during the quarter. It also did work for Google, Amazon Prime Video, Samsung and Grupo Modelo.

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Nov. 20, 2018, by Joe Honick

The three part Ron Levy assault on this man who has indeed been a career producer seems unjustified....especially as good person Ron has so actively "forgiven" all sorts of miscues of others in order to benefit from PR handling. If Ron would take a few moments to check out the recent ups and downs of the precarious stock markets, he might just find that some of the biggest outfits have occasionally suffered lower nets while increasing grosses through energetic and creative investment to grow. I don't know Mr. Sorrell, but it is pretty clear he's a pretty good "warrior" in the business world.

Nov. 19, 2018, by Ronald N. Levy

Wikipedia defines "gross profit" as "the difference between revenue and the cost of making a product or providing a service, before deducting overheads, payroll, taxation and interest payments."

Before payroll!

So "gross profit" tells how much they WOULD have made if they had no payroll, no overhead and no taxes not even sales tax. How much DID they make after payroll? I don't see this anywhere. Even if the main thing one learns in Accounting 101 is not to take Accounting 102, clearly "gross profit" doesn't mean

profit." It doesn't even mean there was ANY profit.

But Martin Sorrell is brilliant, certainly one of the greatest ever. If WPP could possibly lure him to return, perhaps by buying S4 Capital, that could for WPP--and especially for the clients--be immensely profitable!

Nov. 16, 2018, by Ronald N. Levy

Oddly, I still can't find--anywhere--news of how much NET PROFIT (if any) this company made.

Many media have run figures from the release on the reported rise in sales and "gross profit" (an intermediate number) but only on odwyerpr.com do we see a question raised of how much NET profit there is and whether there is any net profit at all.

Can you imagine any reason why a company would announce quarterly sales but not earnings if any? Does it seem likely that if earnings were GOOD they would be reported or even if earnings were okay?

The stock price for the past 52 weeks, we can see from Google, has been a high of 220, a low of 103, and is currently 114.

Nov. 15, 2018, by Ronald N. Levy

Why can we see from Google that despite a reported "31.7% jump in gross profit," which sounds marvelous, the stock went DOWN today from 116 to 114? (Google: SFOR (Lon).)

Perhaps because "gross profit" is not net profit, what people call "the bottom line." A rise in "gross profit," an intermediate number, doesn't mean a rise or even a break even in net profit. It does not even mean there was any net profit at all!

Roth at IPG recently reported a nice rise in gross profit but the net profit actually went down!

We can see from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times that nearly all quarterly reports announce NET profit which permits readers to compare a company's profitability with that of a year ago.